Of Course I would point out that when you are actually animating a scene A:M is the fastest and best program out there to do the animation… So the time lost in one area is gained in another. Also 99% of the quality issues I have had with A:M have cleared up in 10.5 so it really is just a matter of speed, and rendering in A:M is not the fastest. The real question needs to be: do i want to animate or do stills and which toolset is more important to me? If you want to just make stills… well take your pick just about every app out there can do stills it’s really when you need to do more than static images that the tools of A:M come into their own
If you know how to do it, though, you can just set up layers for rendering and pop em into your compositing app to get the same AE integration that C4D shows on their site.
Setting up a chor to do layered renders is very easy (IMHO) and provides the same base functionality. If you need camera tracking that’s a little harder to get out of A:M, but AE has tools for that built in. Rendering in layers overcomes most of the speed roadblocks by giving the render small chunks to work with at a time. Ten little chunks will render faster than the whole thing in one pass and your time to set it up is more than compensated… (of course if anyone wants to write an applescript to set up the chors automatically and build a renderpool I wouldn’t complain 
)
Once you have the layers Quality is less of an issue and you have more control over… well… everything. BUT you have to learn three sets of skills: 1) Animation and all the related skills to that lighting modeling texturing etc. 2) compositing and 3) Project organization. Project organization is perhaps the most important of the three… you can have a lot of files when you work this way and you have to be able to keep tack of what goes where…
Multi-Pass (in the A:M sense) is going to be slower… you are rendering the image with the same renderer More Than Once… logic then follows that it will take X times longer to render where X is the number of Passes.
as far as Cinema 4D and LW go… eh you can keep em… unless they have made some sort of revolutionary steps in usability since last I saw them I’d still rather get dental work than animate in either of them. I mean just look at this thing: Maxxon IK Chain thing in this day and age, setting up a leg has no excuse to be this complicated.
-David Rogers
